BLACK LIGHT by Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan & Stephen Romano
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BLACK LIGHT
Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan & Stephen Romano Mulholland Books (www.mulhollandbooks.co.uk) £12.99 Released: 13th October |
When we first meet Buck Carlsbad, at the opening of Black Light, he is hard at work, taking down a mark – a ghost that has latched onto a living person. Buck has a gift, which he calls “The Pull” that allows him to suck these marks into himself and eventually regurgitate them into a silver urn, which he then buries in his back yard, effectively sealing them away forever. These marks, when inside Buck, enhance his ability to see the Blacklight, the world in which the dead live, a sort of layering onto the real world of all past versions of that world. Buck has no idea where his gift came from – orphaned at 7, he suspects that his parents were similarly gifted, but he has been unable to find out where they disappeared to, or why the left him to fend for himself.
When Buck is hired by a billionaire businessman to protect the first journey of a high-speed train between Los Angeles and Las Vegas that runs through an area of desert that Buck calls the Blacklight Triangle – due to the high instance of ghost activity in the area – he jumps at the chance. Buck has history in the Triangle, and suspects that this train journey may be the best bet he has of finding out what happened to his parents. Assembling a team, Buck boards the train along with an assortment of film and music stars, a camera crew, and the man slated to be the next President of the USA – and his Secret Service detail – and finds himself on a high-speed journey into hell with no-one to trust but himself.
“By writers from the SAW franchise”, the book cover tells us, something which excited me until I realised that Messrs Melton and Dunstan were behind four of the later entries to a series that – in my opinion – lost the plot about ten minutes into the third instalment. So, I started Black Light with a certain amount of trepidation. We’re thrown into the middle of the action, and we discover Buck’s Gift as we watch him use it to ensnare the ghost of a child killer who is haunting his wife. Buck is a character of some depth: he’s an orphan with this strange gift, and the only conclusion he can draw is that one or other of his parents has passed it on to him. He has a strange relationship with a young woman who is head-over-heels in love with him, and an even stranger relationship with his local priest, a man who provides him with the silver urns he requires to “store” his marks. He has a long and troubled history with the Blacklight, a history that cost one man his life, and almost cost Buck his own, but for Buck it’s the only way he is ever likely to discover who he is, and where he came from.
The story starts slowly, introducing the characters, and their various abilities, and the concept of the high-speed train that runs between the Lost Angels Plaza in Los Angeles and the Dreamworld resort in Las Vegas. As we see these things spring into life around us, I couldn’t help but be struck by similarities to the third volume of Stephen King’s Dark Tower epic, The Waste Lands: the Lost Angels Plaza as the Cradle of Lud; the Jaeger Laser as Blaine the Mono; the Blacklight Triangle as the waste lands themselves. Like Roland’s story, there’s an overarching sense of doom as the main players move into position, and the train readies for departure.
From that point on, around about the middle of the book, the narrative grabs the reader by the throat, throttles up a few notches, and drags us along for a ride that moves as fast as the train itself. There is no let-up in the action, and I would certainly recommend trying to read this portion of the book in a single sitting for maximum effect. The authors have a fine grasp of how to move a story along at breakneck pace, and how to keep the reader interested. The story is extremely visual, cinematic in its approach and scope. The book cover adds to this illusion, a movie poster that is eye-catching and intriguing. There are times when it seems we’re reading a film script – or a Matthew Reilly novel – but thankfully they’re few and far between. There is no mistaking that these are very talented writers who have done an excellent job of translating their skills of writing for the screen to writing an engaging and extremely entertaining novel.
Dark, gory and brilliantly-plotted, Black Light combines the elements of a good horror novel, with the stylistic tics of a mystery story, and the pace and tone of the best thrillers on the market. Melton, Dunstan and Romano have created, in Buck Carlsbad, a likeable, if somewhat damaged, character that the reader can identify with and root for. They’ve also created a mythology and backstory that is solid and original. The combination make this one to watch, and a dead cert for a series of novels and films charting Buck’s journey. If you’re a fan of Felix Castor or John Constantine, or are looking for a horror story that’s a bit different from the norm, then Black Light is the book for you.
THE BREACH by Patrick Lee
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The Breach
Patrick Lee (www.patrickleefiction.com) HarperCollins (www.harpercollins.com) £6.99 |
There are authors I read because I thoroughly enjoy their work, and they provide me with meaty substance that keeps me reading for days or weeks. There are other authors whose work I enjoy, but for an entirely different reason: they give me a sense of escapism, it’s like watching a fast-paced movie as you read through the words on the page. They usually produce hefty-looking tomes with chapters that span a page and a half or two pages, and frequently end each and every chapter with a hook to keep me reading! (some, James Patterson, are more blatant about this than others, but they all do it to some degree).
I picked up THE BREACH because it looked like a great ride: a man, whose past we know nothing about, except that he has spent the past decade and a half in prison, is hiking in the wilderness of Alaska. Three days out from the nearest sign of civilisation, he comes across a crashed, plain white, Boeing 747 and finds, upon investigation, that all of its occupants – including the First Lady of the United States of America – have been mercilessly slaughtered. From there, he encounters the two surviving members of the plane’s crew, being brutally tortured in a clearing not too far distant. Within minutes, this seemingly innocuous man is toting M16s in a way that would put Sylvester Stallone to shame, and manages to save one of the prisoners – a good-looking young woman (as if you didn’t know) who works for a top secret organisation called Tangent.
Tangent, it turns out, was formed to protect and investigate a strange breach that has opened 51 storeys beneath Wyoming, a gateway to another world which drops three to four entities – pieces of seemingly-alien technology – a day from some unknown time or place. It turns out that the most dangerous of these – the Whisper, which has the ability to control whoever is holding it – has been stolen, along with a couple of other very convenient entities, by a former Tangent employee who is now set on taking control of the Breach and, it seems, the world.
That’s the set-up. The rest, as you can imagine, is fairly predictable. Travis Chase, the man who started out as a hiker and ended up as Rambo on crack, joins Tangent, shoots people, uses different pieces of alien technology to get out of various precarious situations. Luckily, the breach seems to have produced exactly the right set of entities to make sure that Travis makes it out the other end, which is all very convenient. And, of course, Travis falls in love with Paige – the aforementioned young lady – and manages to get her into bed in the middle of all the excitement, horror and explosions. Again, as if you didn’t see that coming. It all builds inexorably towards the climax which, it turns out, is more of an anti-climax that leaves something of a sour aftertaste.
It goes without saying that Lee’s novel requires the suspension of disbelief for the duration. Like the books of Matthew Reilly, it moves with a breakneck pace and manages to keep the reader entertained throughout, despite the fact that you’re likely to spend most of the novel wanting to throw it across the room in disgust. One for a plane journey, then, or a trip to the b(r)each. Just don’t expect anything highbrow or believable. This is the literary equivalent of a Jason Statham movie, and it is advised that you check your brain at the door for maximum enjoyment.
